


the sun pours

by sashawire



Category: Free!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Tokyo Ghoul, Ambiguous Relationships, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood and Gore, Childhood, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Major Character Injury, Rebellion, Scent Marking, Symbolism, Tokyo Ghoul √A Finale Spoilers, but not in a sexy way, hazuki nagisa-centric, mild Protectiveness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-21
Updated: 2019-11-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:49:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21515608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sashawire/pseuds/sashawire
Summary: It occurs to them, four years too late, that ghouls aren’t supposed to befriend humans.
Relationships: Hazuki Nagisa & Everyone, Hazuki Nagisa & Iwatobi Swim Club, Hazuki Nagisa & Ryuugazaki Rei
Kudos: 10





	the sun pours

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "Speechless Messages" by Vijay Vishal.
> 
> apologies for any errors/inconsistencies in honorifics. i'm still learning, u guys.

They’re ten years old, and the daffodils are in bloom.

There’s a tiny kid sitting on the pavement outside, scribbling on the concrete with chunky chalks that coat his hands and clothes in messy colour. The ground is still soggy from the previous night’s rainfall, but the boy doesn’t seem to mind.

At first, the three of them are content to sit, hidden in the shadows of the contorted old maple tree. Their parents don’t let them go to elementary school just yet, so Rin insists on observing this strange behavior.

The kid spots them anyway, and races over to say hi, asks why they’re hiding in the branches of the tree. There are smudges of yellow across his cheek and above his eyebrow.

“I’m drawing the daffodils,” he says, and gestures to the vague, blobby shapes that decorate the sidewalk. Haru huffs, but it’s nearly silent.

Makoto is the first to climb out of the tree, ever polite, squirming and dangling his way down the tree until he hits the ground with a sigh of relief.

The blond boy extends a nub of green chalk to him, eyes shiny and grin missing two teeth. He smells sweet and sapid, he smells like human flesh.

“Nagisa,” the kid says his name is, and he pulls Makoto away to draw with him. It doesn’t take long for Haru to follow them, eyeing the scene warily, and Rin, not wanting to seem like a scaredy-cat, slips down the tree almost immediately after.

They spend the rest of the spring-summer afternoon scribbling on the pavement with cheap chalks.

Nagisa is all sticky hands and streaky pink dust, but he holds the fallen, crumpled daffodil petals as if they were diamonds.

* * *

They’re eleven years old, and they learn about the CCG.

(Well. Makoto, Haru, and Nagisa do. Rin already knew some bits and pieces, told in whispers and side-glances from black-draped almost-strangers as they patted his mother’s shoulder and spoke of tragedy, as if it was some sort of  _ accident _ that his father was never coming home.)

“The Commission of Counter Ghoul,” the guest speaker says, and Rin’s knuckles tighten on the edge of the desk.

(It was never an accident.)

Their speech is flattened and rounded around the corners, fit for a classroom full of children, but it still leaves many looking a little queasy. Nagisa excuses it by saying he ate too much sweet bread that morning, leaving Makoto and Rin shaking their heads in disbelief.

He still sprawls out in the sunshine as he always does, the golden blush of the sun hiding the grey that hollowed his cheeks. Nagisa watches the slender purple flowers around him dance precariously in the breeze.

The words of the CCG investigator echoes through the school yard in the voices of gossiping children. Makoto closes his eyes and tries not to focus on the bloody tales or the ever-present, gnawing smell of  _ human _ that has become a part of his everyday life.

* * *

(They never tell Nagisa that they’re ghouls.)

* * *

They’re fourteen, and Rin announces he’s leaving for the 13th Ward. It’s on the other side of the city.

There’s a lot of deep, blue stares from Haru and soulful sad looks from Makoto, and Rin seems unfazed, back straight and eyes glinting in the early summer dazzle.

There’s a lot of ghoul activity in that Ward. It’s also swarming with doves.

_ Are you going for school? _ Makoto wants to ask, though all three of them already know the answer. Rin’s silence is enough.

Rin turns to them, the light in his eyes sharpening into a glare. “I’m not spending the rest of my life choking down their food and pretending to be one of  _ them,” _ Haru’s expression doesn’t change, and Makoto just bumps his knuckles together nervously.

There are a lot of things he wants to say.  _ They cut ghouls to pieces and rearrange them into weapons. We don’t know anything about the rebellion. You’re going full rogue, just for a taste of revenge? _

He keeps his mouth shut. Rin leaves.

Nagisa cries when he finds out, big tears and bigger sobs, strange on his small frame. In between sniffles, he laments about how  _ dangerous _ it is for Rin in the 13th Ward, which is stranger. Nagisa barely seems to know what fear is.

Haru and Makoto don’t ask what kind of danger he thinks Rin is in.

* * *

(It occurs to them, four years too late, that ghouls aren’t supposed to befriend humans.)

* * *

Nagisa is thirteen-and-a-half, and he tries to talk to Rin the night before he leaves.

He sneaks up to Rin’s window in the dead of the night, when their world is silent as a grave, knocking on the glass and shivering as his breath condenses in front of him.

Rin never answers.

In the morning, Rin finds flower heads on his windowsill, round, pink, wilting azaleas. They are frilly and only beginning to lose their vividness, and he should have been embarassed of them, but he cups them slowly and lifts them into his room, wincing as dead petals drop onto the floor.

The flowers, in all their hurriedly-picked glory, sit on his desk until he leaves that evening, quietly rotting into heaps.

* * *

Rei is seventeen, and he has a stalker.

He knows most people would protest that  _ stalker _ is too strong of a word, but for Rei, who prefers to think of himself as a reserved person  _ (not _ a loner) that’s sure what it feels like.

It’s in the way Hazuki leans dangerously forward over his desk, the rim of it  _ surely _ digging into his stomach in a way that must be painful, and chattering on and on to Rei about summer and daffodils and swimming in the ocean.

It’s in the way Hazuki beams up at him when they’re pressed together by unfortunate chance on the train, cheeks bunched up and teeth peeking out.

It’s in the way Hazuki steals little things from Rei, erasers he balances on his nose, pencils he sticks behind his ears, just to get Rei to chase him.

It’s in the way that during these moments, Rei is close enough to get a sudden whiff of Hazuki, unmasked by the other people around them. Underneath the sugary sweet strawberry smell humans, especially  _ that _ human, seem to enjoy so much, underneath the savoury scent of human flesh in general, there’s the distinct smell of ghoul. Possibly several, likely  _ powerful _ ghouls.

And that’s the main reason Rei tries to stay away from Hazuki, aside from about a hundred others.

Hazuki  _ stinks _ of ghoul. It’s in his clothes, his hair, it’s probably burrowed down into the marrow of his bones and the blood in his veins. Whoever has marked Hazuki, they don’t want another ghoul  _ touching  _ him. So Rei, never looking to for a ghoul fight, with all its ugly clawing and splatters and clashing of kagune, tries valiantly to stay away.

Tries, being the operative word there. Hazuki has latched on.

He passes notes to Rei in class - tiny doodles of bunnies and smiley faces and stick figures - and claps for him after his vaults in track, so enthusiastically Rei’d think they were mocking him if it were anyone else. The problem, the problem is, even when Hazuki isn’t even looking at him, Rei still feels dancey and buzzing, as if his body were covered in fireflies, pricking and glowing and crawling their way into his skin.

Hazuki Nagisa is made of compressed sunshine. He’s golden and he’s bright and he’s  _ annoying _ when you’re trying to be productive. Despite his small stature, Hazuki seems to fill the entire room without trying, in laughs and clapping and silly impressions and bunchy smiles.

Even when Hazuki isn’t bothering Rei incessantly, he can still  _ feel  _ Hazuki’s presence in the room, just as well as he can feel the temperature.

And, oh, Rei hates,  _ hates _ himself for it, but - he feels this little stab, a brief, nasty curl of his stomach when he thinks about the ghouls that have marked Hazuki.

He’s not quite sure what they’re thinking; Emotions aside, Hazuki is just, objectively, a bad choice for a meal. He’s small, not much of a three-courser, but he’s athletic and spirited enough to put up a fight. He’s loud, and prefers wide, busy streets to dark alleys where he’s easy to attack. He’s bright enough for his absence to be noticed, and popular enough to cause an uproar. Hazuki Nagisa is the poster-child for the  _ worst _ type of human to aim for.

It's not impossible to figure out why he's being singled out, though. For some, hunting, stalking, toying with their prey is half the fun. It's the showing off, like a cat with a half-dead mouse clamped between its jaws.

Rei was brought up to not play with his food. Unnecessarily cruel, his parents called it.

Unnecessarily cruel, Rei thinks as he watches Hazuki try and fail to balance one pencil on top of another while he thinks no one is watching, unaware of the ghouls that may as well have branded the word  _ MINE  _ across his forehead.

* * *

Rei is seventeen, and he is presented with a flower.

It happens like this; for some inexplicable reason, he lets Hazuki come on a run with him.

(Pity. It's pity, he tells himself, when the flesh under his skin roils at the realization that any day now, he's going to wake up and see Hazuki Nagisa's face plastered across milk cartons.)

Hazuki is surprisingly fast and durable, for his short stature. Rei supposes swimming regularly must at least have a couple of advantages.

Alas, his classmate has not yet learned the art of quiet, polite small talk.

Hazuki chatters enough for about five people, yapping on about the ocean and the homework assignment Amakata-sensei had given them and whoever Haru-chan and Mako-chan are, barely once pausing to grab at air.

Another perk of being a swimmer, Rei muses absently.

Hazuki's monologue stutters to a halt as he gasps, and Rei glances to the side, wondering if Hazuki is about to pass out from lack of oxygen to the brain.

Instead, Rei sees his classmates face light up, so suddenly that he's tempted to squint. The stars in Hazuki's eyes are going supernova.

“Rei-chan! Look!”

Rei trails his gaze along Hazuki's pointed finger, until it hits on what is being pointed at.

A dandelion, fluffy but still yellow, pushes up through cracks in the pavement they were jogging on. It’s remarkably reminiscent of a newborn chicken hatching from some strange, slate-coloured egg.

Rei levels an unimpressed look at his classmate, but Hazuki is still beaming at the little yellow flower in the ground before them. It’s stark against the muddy grey of the concrete surrounding it.

Hazuki jogs forward, and kneels in front of the dandelion, plucking it carefully, as far down the stem as he can. He rises up, cupping the flower in his hands like it’s the most precious thing in the world.

“Aren’t dandelions meant to be weeds, Hazuki-kun?” It comes out more exasperated than it had in his head.

“It’s only a weed if it’s not meant to be there,” Hazuki replies easily, and Rei is left blinking, wondering what  _ that’s _ supposed to mean.

“I don’t think that the dandelion is meant to be growing in the pavement.”

“Why shouldn’t it? It’s not doing any harm, just because it isn’t where it’s meant to be.” Hazuki shifts his hands, so he’s holding the dandelion by the stem. “I think the pavement would be nicer if it had loads of flowers growing in it.”

Rei blinks again, unsure of how to reply to that. “...Okay.” He clears his throat, and glances from the flower to Hazuki. “What’s the big deal about the dandelion?”

Hazuki grins. “It reminds me of you, Rei-chan,”

“...We’re both not where we’re meant to be?” Rei can’t think of how that applies to anything in his life.

Hazuki’s eyes glint, and he can hear the  _ you’re silly, Rei-chan, _ in them without the words needing to be said. “Isn’t it obvious?” Hazuki holds out the dandelion as gently as possible. “You’re beautiful.”

Nagisa keeps coming with him on runs, after that.

* * *

(It’s a couple of nights later, something clicks for Rei. He’s never actually said ‘no’ to Nagisa. He’s never actually told him to leave him alone, or to go away. Rei considers the implications of this.

It could mean that if Rei were to look Nagisa right in the eyes and tell him to stop following him around, it would work. Nagisa would stop pestering him, stop leaning on his desk and stop passing him notes and stop chattering to him on the train.

Rei’s stomach churns uncomfortably at that. It’s not what he wants. He’s not quite sure what he  _ does _ want, but he doesn’t want Nagisa to stop hanging off him.

Rei hasn’t had friends in a long, long time. It’s too much stress to hide his ghoulishness from humans, too much distraction from his studies, and other ghouls are competition, dangerous in a whole different way.

He wonders if this is what having friends is.)

(He also wonders when  _ Hazuki _ became  _ Nagisa.) _

* * *

Rei is seventeen, and he meets Haruka-senpai and Makoto-senpai for the first time.

It really is inevitable, for how much Nagisa never shuts up about them. Most of what Rei gathered from his chatter was that Haru-chan is quiet but always smiling on the inside, and Mako-chan loves kitties a whole lot.

Rei is holding his lunch, folded neatly and arranged in order of colour, ready to find somewhere quiet where he could pretend to eat it unbothered, when Nagisa comes up to him.

Amongst all the blather about food and everything that had happened to Nagisa that day, Rei catches the invitation to come and eat lunch with Nagisa and Mako-chan and Haru-chan, maybe even Gou-chan if she’s there. Upon weighing the pros and cons of eating alone and unbothered versus eating with Nagisa, he follows his friend down the hallway.

Nagisa bounces up the stairs to the roof with more enthusiasm than usual (which Rei… really didn’t think was possible) and throws open the door to the roof with enough force to kill anyone who’s standing in front of it.

Haru-chan-san and Mako-chan-san are two figures sitting together, leaning against the low wall that edges around the roof to prevent students from falling off every other day. They are upwind to where Rei is standing.

His blood may have frozen solid in his veins for how suddenly he stills.

It’s them. It’s  _ them. _ They’re the ghouls that Rei has been wondering about since the day Nagisa first introduced himself. They’re the ghouls that Rei is painfully reminded of every time Nagisa stands too close.

They’re the ghouls that are planning to kill and eat Nagisa like a rabbit tangled up in a snare.

Outrage rises in Rei’s throat, starting in his stomach and twisting upwards, hot and suffocating. This isn’t fair. Nagisa talks about Mako and Haru as if they hung the moon and sun and everything in between, the bubbliest, warmest,  _ rawest  _ affection in his tone. And they’re, what, faking the entire thing? Stringing Nagisa along until they can corner him in a dark alley and rip his guts out? Rei tastes bile behind his fury.

He swallows both down.

He and Nagisa pick their way over to the two ghouls, and Rei just keeps reminding himself that Mako and Haru are powerful, and have been tailing Nagisa for a while. It would do no good to pick a fight with them in the middle of a school day.

_ (Or at all, _ the logical part of him whispers, and the rest of him yells at it to shut up.)

(He hasn’t gone through this entire  _ thing _ with Nagisa just for his first friend to die at the hands of two other ghouls. That’s not what’s going to happen.)

They reach Haru and Mako, and the overwhelming smell of  _ powerful ghoul _ only gets more oppressive. Rei’s instincts tell him to bolt, spelling  _ DANGER  _ in large, red letters, but he stands his ground.

Haru’s eyes flash dangerously when Rei approaches, flickering from cool blue to red and black for just a split second, too quick for anyone else to catch. Mako’s smile stiffens just a little around the edges.

Nagisa introduces them happily, apparently oblivious to the iron bubble of tension that surrounds them.

They spend lunch in silence but for Nagisa’s chatter and Makoto’s occasional soft reply. Haruka doesn’t speak after greeting Rei for the first time, and his voice is as cold as his eyes. It’s all Rei can do to twitch against the urge to flee.

Later that day, thankfully past the lunch that Rei felt was spent suspended in a block of ice, he and Nagisa jog together.

Nagisa talks and talks, and still doesn’t mention the awkwardness of lunch, so Rei assumes that he didn’t notice. Nagisa skips from topic to topic effortlessly and endlessly, so it’s all Rei can do to try to keep up.

Eventually, Rei interrupts with a question of his own.

“How long have you known Makoto-san and Haruka-san?” He tries not to dread the answer.

Nagisa hums. “Well… we were— so it was about—” he taps the pads of his fingers a little, counting in his head. “Seven years?”

Rei stops in his tracks.

Actually, physically stops. He’s pretty sure he stops doing anything for a second, especially the important things, like breathing, or his beating his heart. “What?”

Nagisa blinks at him. “Huh, well, I guess we met when I was nine, so it was more like,” he tilts his head to the side, a curl flopping gracelessly into his eyes. “Seven and a half years.”

Seven and a half. Seven and a half  _ years. _

For ghouls to fake befriending someone for that long, wouldn’t just be unlikely. It would be  _ ridiculous. _ Playing the long game like that defeats the actual purpose of the game in the first place.

Rei rests his hands on his knees and holds back a wheeze, condensing it into a tight, choked noise that could be a sob or a laugh or more likely, both.

“Are you alright, Rei-chan?”

Rei can only stare at his runners and grip his sweatpants in hot fists. He blinks. “You're not going to die,” he mumbles.

A grumbling huff comes from in front of him. “I can't hear what you're saying!”

“I said I'm fine, Nagisa-kun,” Rei clears his throat and pushes his glasses up from where they were tilting off his face.

Nagisa stares at him, squinting in suspicion, but ultimately seems to brush it off. He launches into another story about the one time a cat snuck its way into Makoto's fresh laundry and wouldn't leave for four hours.

Rei listens, shoulders sloping and relaxed, no longer resembling the dark, harsh line of the horizon at sunset.

* * *

Rei is seventeen, and Nagisa is a part of his life.

He's not an annoying outlier anymore, someone who brushes up against the edges of his daily routine and throws it just out of balance. Nagisa is integrated in. Just as often as Rei will wake up in the morning, or eat a balanced breakfast, or brush his teeth for the full two minutes, Nagisa will greet him at the bus station with bouncy heels and unending commentary on everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen in their world.

Of course, it's hard to have much of a routine after that. Before, Rei would have taken the train to school, focused on his classes for most of the day, eaten lunch somewhere quiet, perhaps the library or with Sera-senpai, and then taken the train home.

He still does most of these things now, but Nagisa is an unknowable and unpredictable variable. He'll offer Rei some sweet snack to eat on the train, he'll pass Rei silly notes with puns and doodles during class, he'll pull Rei off to eat lunch with Makoto-senpai and Haru-senpai, he'll insist that he and Rei try out the new coffee shop that just opened down the street after school, everyone is saying good things about it, Rei-chan, come on!

(Rei can only thank the universe that Nagisa, in some bizarre real-life plot twist, actually prefers black coffee to the sugary, milky lattes that one would assume he'd adore.

So when Rei orders a black coffee alongside him, he doesn't get any playful bugging from Nagisa insisting that Rei try his drink. Which would inevitably end with Rei throwing up quietly in the customer bathroom as his stomach rejects any contents that aren't human flesh or coffee beans.)

Rei meets Rin only once, when he comes from the 13th ward to visit. It's an awkward affair on Rei's part, not having much to say as Haru and Makoto and Nagisa flock to him.

Makoto and Haru had accepted Rei as… a friend, after a quiet and threatening conversation one lunchtime while Nagisa was out sick, but Rin's eyes flash black and red when they meet Rei's, a warning startlingly similar to Haru’s. Were Rei a less respectful person, he would've wanted to roll his eyes. He's already had this discussion.

Before Rin leaves (after just a couple of hours, to the others' audible disappointment), he hands Nagisa something round and pink. Rei doesn't get a good look at what it is, but Nagisa cups it to his chest and blinks wetly, so Rei thinks it best not to ask.

Rin's goodbye is anticlimactic. Nagisa squeezes Rei's hand the entire time.

* * *

They're seventeen, and things are happening in the 13th ward.

Massive things. Ghouls are murdering people in the streets, half the doves in the city are there, and the rebellion is breathing down their necks, waiting for a turning point.

It's rippling into the other wards.

Ghouls are disappearing, either gone to join the rebellion or fleeing from the fight. Few are brave enough to remain caught in the limbo of wondering when the CCG is going to break down their door and shoot their family.

Haruka and Makoto leave before Rei does. One day, they're in school, and the next day they're not. Amakata-sensei just marks it down on the register and doesn't say anything.

Nagisa is quiet at lunch. Kou disappeared a little after Rin’s visit, so he and Rei are now the only ones left.

They visit Haruka and Makoto's places after school. Both homes are dark and empty as a whale's mouth, and Nagisa flinches at the cold. He doesn't ask where they went, but Rei does catch him wiping at his eyes and sniffling in a way that he probably thinks is subtle.

Rei says nothing, puts a gentle hand on Nagisa's shoulder, and ignores the cracking of his own heart.

He knows he won't be able to stay much longer; their ward is close to 13, and the riots are leaking into 13's surrounding districts. A lot of the humans in those areas are starting to flee the city as well.

Rei hopes Nagisa joins them. He's not built for fighting a war.

Then again, neither is Rei.

* * *

Rei's seventeen, and his brother joins the riots.

It's completely out of the blue. His brother has always been more outgoing than him, but participating in a rebellion is another level entirely. It'll be loud and terrifying and so, so dangerous.

At the last second, Rei goes with him. Just walks after his brother, out the door, into the soft morning air. For now, it's still peaceful in the 20th ward.

They walk to the train station in silence. His brother has a kitchen knife in his back pocket.

* * *

Rei is seventeen, and three days later, he gets stabbed with someone's kagune.

To be fair, it probably wasn’t intentional. He got too close to a panicked ghoul, she probably caught a whiff of human on his clothes, assumed he was a dove, and lashed out.

The throw was beautiful, frankly, and Rei would have been impressed if it weren't for the koukaku lodged in his upper thigh.

Rei yells, the other ghoul flees, and he's left there, a burning wound in his hip and his glasses somewhere on the other side of the street. It’s freezing out there.

He won't die. Accelerated ghoul healing will scab the wound over long before he bleeds out. But he's still in the middle of a rioting city and has nowhere to lay low until he's back on his feet.

He's about as vulnerable as a sickly lamb to the doves, at the moment. Or, God, other ghouls as well.

Rei grips the brick wall at his back, and lifts himself up with all the strength in his body, fingers scrabbling and pain roaring through his body, his toes numb and his lungs full of cement. It was almost worse than being stabbed in the first place.

He makes it into a back alley before he collapses.

He knows he won't be safe there for long, he's not even safe there  _ now, _ but God knows he can't move any further.

It's definitely a mistake to pass out behind a dumpster, but he can't really do anything about the hazy, black stars dancing through his vision, either. The last thing he sees are fat flakes of white, drifting from the grey expanse stretching across the sky above him.

He doesn't feel the slender pair of arms that wrap around his chest, under his armpits, and drag him away.

* * *

They're seventeen, and Rei wakes up in the corner of an old coffee shop.

It's clearly been abandoned not too long ago. The tables are only lightly dusty and the place still hums with the soft smell of coffee and human flesh.

His stomach clenches in hunger, and he shivers from his place, curled up in a pool of his own blood.

Or, well, most of it is probably his own blood. He may have been a bit rusty in training, but he can still hold his own in a fight.

Wait.

His heart crashes to a halt as he hears a soft humming coming from the back room, punctuated by the clinking of ceramic.

The swinging door is pushed open, and a familiar head of blond hair comes into view.

No.

Nagisa's face breaks out into a sun of a smile upon seeing Rei. “Rei-chan! You're awake!”

Rei can only stare at him, mouth closed, dumbfounded. Nagisa is wearing a CCG uniform. Rei's stomach drops at the thought of him putting himself into the thick of the riots.

He can vaguely hear the sound of his own blood leaking to the floor.

Nagisa settles two mugs of black coffee onto the nearest tabletop, the grin not dropping from his face. “Oh, I was so worried that you weren't gonna wake up!” He looks as if he’s stepping between worlds, his right side reflecting the dim orange lights that still glow outside the windows, his left side completely drenched in shade, like the dark of the moon.

If Rei's hands weren't already soaked in blood, they would be dripping sweat. He touches the soft skin underneath his eye.

Then promptly scrabbles to cover both eyes as he suddenly realizes that they were almost definitely still ghoulish black after the fight.

Nagisa saw his eyes. Nagisa knows he’s a ghoul.

Rei hyperventilates behind his hands, not caring that he’s smearing blood all over his face and eyebrows.

“Oh, Rei-chan,” Nagisa's voice is uncharacteristically quiet, and silence soaks into the air between them. Rei is a coward, and refuses to look up, fearing disgust or anger or  _ horror. _ “I already knew,”

“Wh—?” Rei squeaks, peeking at him, almost childishly, from between his bloodied fingers. “You…?”

And Nagisa's laugh is sea glass; clear and bright and worn around the edges. When had they all gotten so tired?

“None of you are very good at hiding it, you know,” Nagisa chastises lightly. “I mean, I've never seen any of you eat anything without looking repulsed, in the entire time I've known you. You only ever drink black coffee.”

Nagisa leans over an snags a mug from the tabletop. He holds it out to Rei in invitation, smiling in spite of the city tearing itself apart. There are still flakes falling outside the window, though whether they are ash or snow is impossible to tell.

“I don't actually like black coffee that much,” Nagisa says conversationally, as if he wasn't overturning every assumption Rei had ever made about their friendship. “It's nice! But I prefer tea.”

Rei takes the warm mug wordlessly, unable to take his eyes off where Nagisa begins talking hurriedly, cheeks flushed and hands fidgeting, clearly excited to be able to talk openly about his thoughts.

"But like, don’t worry, I’m sure that nobody else has guessed about your ghoulishness - ghoulocity? - or anything like that, but I've known that Mako-chan and Haru-chan were ghouls since, like, forever, and especially Rin-chan, I mean, have you seen his teeth? And sometimes people react really weirdly to me on the street, especially if they're young, like, our age. They get near me, and like, get this weird look on their face? And then they avoid me, like, cross to the other side of the road if necessary. I’m guessing it’s a ghoul thing, ‘cause Rei-chan, you did it too. Oh God, what if it’s not a ghoul thing and I’m just—”

“It's because you smell,” Rei interrupts, and immediately winces at the offended look that floods Nagisa's features. “Only to ghouls!”

“I do not smell!” Nagisa's cheeks redden even further in indignation as he crosses his arms. “I'm sorry that ghouls can't appreciate the smell of strawberries and bread.”

Rei rolls his eyes, feeling a little bit himself again. “You don't smell  _ bad,” _ He twitches, longing to push nonexistent glasses up the bridge of his nose. “It's just that you smell like ghoul. You smell like a ghoul's property. When I first met you, I was nearly blown away by how much you smelled like Makoto-senpai, Haru-senpai, even Rin-san. Now that my own scent is added to the mix, it must be daunting for any ghoul to smell, let alone a young, inexperienced one.”

His cool, professional explanation is lost to the pouty look on Nagisa's face. “So little ghouls are scared of me because of the way I smell? I'm not scary! I'm cute!”

“Not when you smell like the property of four separate ghouls,”

“But I smell like that all the time,” Nagisa's expression, if possible, grows even more heartbroken. “So... are you saying…” Nagisa claps his hands to his face. “I'm not cute?!”

“That's not what I meant, Nagisa-kun.”

Nagisa's hands fall away from his cheeks, and he pouts even harder, if possible. "I know," he shuffles his feet. “I was just trying to make you laugh.”

Rei tries for a smile and Nagisa brightens, just a little.

“You know what, Nagisa-kun?” Rei says, wincing as he hears the faint splashing of blood hitting linoleum. He really should have healed by now. “It's been too quiet, without you around.” It's only been a few days since the ghoul world has descended into chaos, but sitting here listening to Nagisa's chatter, he realizes that he's missed it more than expected. Missed  _ Nagisa  _ more than expected.

“You think  _ you've  _ been lonely?” Nagisa leans against the counter, sticking his tongue out at Rei, “Try being the one left behind while the rest of you go off to fight a war.”

"I mean, you clearly didn’t stay out for long,” Rei eyes the CCG uniform.

“It was the only way to get near you guys!” Nagisa defends. It's odd, Nagisa is just as animated as usual, perhaps even more so, but under the street- and moon-light, he shines pale. Shadows press into the hollows of his cheeks and eyes, obscuring his faint freckles and giving him a ghost-like appearance.

“It was very, very - dangerous,” Rei nearly trails off halfway through the sentence, noting the sallow look on his best friend's face. “Are you alright, Nagisa-kun?”

Nagisa swallows heavily, but smiles anyway, soft and sunny and familiar. “I'm fine,” he picks up the other mug of coffee, still leaning against the chipped counter. “It's just been a long couple of days, Rei-chan.”

“It has,” Rei agrees softly, and it's true, but he suspects that that's not all.

Nagisa coughs into his hand. “So,” he begins, raspy, then clears his throat and tries again. “I've always wanted to know, Rei-chan, what kind of tentacles do you have?”

Rei blinks at him. “Tentacles?”

“You know!” Nagisa waves his arm, frustrated, still half-dipped in the shadows. “The weird spiky thingies that ghouls fight with.”

“Oh!” Rei smiles, properly this time, stretching out one blood-soaked leg. “You mean my kagune.”

“Yeah! That thing.” Nagisa beams, bright enough to thin the darkness of the room, and looks a little less sickly. “So, what kind do you have?”

“Ukaku.”

“I have no idea what that means, Rei-chan.”

“It's like…” Rei's shoulder-blades itch. “Instead of tentacles, I have spiky wings.” He can feel heat flushing high in his cheekbones at his own lackluster explanation.

But Nagisa gasps, eyes lighting up. “That is so cool! I've never heard of that before!” He leans forward, bracing himself on the counter-top edge. “Can you show me?”

Rei shrugs, one hand going up to tap at glasses that weren't there. “I suppose.” And then he does.

He can't see the wings at his back, but he can watch the purple, blue and green lights dance across the walls and windows and Nagisa’s awed face, a private aurora borealis. Rei lets himself bask in the familiar hues for just a couple of moments, the soft and the bright and the in-between, before his strength fails him and he tucks the kagune back in. Shadows creep in.

“Rei-chan!” Nagisa's voice is brimming with  _ something, _ something familiar and indescribable. Rei is thrown into a memory, of the day that Nagisa held out a flower as if it were gold, and past Nagisa's voice choruses with his current self's: “You're  _ beautiful.” _

Whenever Nagisa says things like that,  _ you're beautiful _ or  _ don't leave, _ he says it with an undercurrent of something unique. He says it with such conviction, such earnestness, as if it's the only truth in the universe. He is always sincere in his compliments.

Nagisa may give off a bubbly, airy exterior, but he's the most thoughtful person Rei knows.

Rei nearly chokes up as he squeezes out a “Thank you.”

What he says is  _ Thank you for the compliment, _ what he means is  _ Thank you, thank you for everything you've done for me. _ Nagisa gives a slow smile.

Something red hits the floor.

The blood isn’t Rei's. He can feel the stiffness of dried blood on his clothes, the odd way his new scab pulls with sudden movements. Rei had stopped bleeding a while ago.

Nagisa gives something between a gasp and a sigh, and moves fully into the light.

His left side, a starburst on his abdomen reaching down to halfway down his thigh, is drenched in blood, and more of it is trickling sluggishly down his calf and pooling on the floor.

“It looks worse than it is,” Nagisa offers at Rei’s silence, and it wouldn't be convincing even if there wasn’t a tremor splintering through the last word.

Rei might say something back, but he can't hear anything over his heart crashing in his ears.

“Why didn't you say anything?!” is the first thing he hears himself say, and he should be embarrassed at the high pitch of his voice.

Nagisa shrugs, as if he isn't dying on the spot. “I wanted to talk to you,” he replies, not a hint of regret marring his tone. His mouth twists suddenly.

Rei doesn't move fast enough to catch him before his knees hit the ground.

There's a hole in Nagisa's left side, punctured straight through the fleshy gap between the bottom of his ribcage and the top of his pelvis. Maybe a kagune, maybe a bullet, maybe just a good old-fashioned knife. It's not good.

Nagisa is folding in on himself, wilting like a flower bent at the stem. Rei's hands flutter uselessly, his mind tearing in a hundred million different directions as he grips lightly at his best friend's shoulders, steadying him and trying to figure out what to do.

“Huh,” Nagisa pulls his hand away from his side and squints at the blood dripping from his fingers. “Rei-chan, maybe I  _ am  _ dying.”

Those are his last words before he passes out.

* * *

(Whispers ripple through the CCG. A ghoul was spotted walking through the streets, carrying one of their young recruits. Poor kid was out cold and dripping red tracks down the road, witnesses say.

Little was done on the CCG's part to stop the ghoul taking him. Reasons why, they deigned not to share, but outside speculations include fearing a fight would inflict further injury on the part of the recruit, doubt as to whether or not the kid was even still alive, and point-blank cowardice.

But what makes this story special, enough that variations had spilled out into the general public and are sending murmurs of doubt and confusion through the human masses, is that the ghoul approached the medic's tent.

This would've been novel enough by itself. The tent was considered a safe ground for the doves. It was so heavily guarded, combined with the grim lack of CCG that actually made it back, that no ghoul found it worth attacking in the first place.

The ghoul, tall and built and not much older than most of the newer recruits, stopped just out of reach of the guards.

Lay the human in the snow between them.

And turned and fled.)

* * *

Nagisa is seventeen, and he has daffodils on the stand next to his bed.

Makoto and Haru brought them when they came to visit. Nagisa could tell that Makoto wanted to tell him off for involving himself in the riots, but something about this dreary old hospital room seemed to put him off.

It’s not pity, Nagisa hopes. Sure, he might be stuck in this weird, stiff hospital bed, but he’s not  _ dying. _ (At least, he hopes he isn’t. The doctors would probably have to tell him if he was.) He’ll be fine after, like, half a century of sleep.

He’s glad for the daffodils on his nightstand. The sun is still hidden behind storm-clouds, and has been since that night in the coffee shop, so he needs some pop of colour in this pool of gloomy grey.

Some doves came in and asked him a bunch of questions after he woke up, during which he pretended to be doped up on painkillers to get them to leave him alone. No, he didn’t know the identity of the ghoul who brought him to the medic’s tent (which was technically true; he didn’t know  _ for sure). _ No, he didn’t know why the ghoul chose to bring him to the medic rather than eat him (another technicality). No, he didn’t have any suspicions as to who carried him to the tent (this one was an outright lie).

Afterwards, though, he was allowed visitors.

Makoto and Haru visit when they can, but the rebellion has hit its turning point. The CCG are beginning to encounter non-ghoul protestors. Videos and photos and posts criticizing the Commission for its extreme prejudice and excessive force are gaining momentum.

What the catalyst for this was, they wouldn’t say, but Nagisa has been permitted his phone again and can see all the circulating news stories for himself.  _ Ghoul carries young CCG recruit to safety in the middle of a warzone. _ Thank God no one managed to take a picture.

The ghoul in question has barely left his hospital room since he woke up (at least). Nagisa can sense the scolding he’s going to receive once he’s out of this place, in every time Rei repeats the story, to Makoto or Haru or Gou or Rin. It’s okay, though. Nagisa will let Rei lecture him, because behind all that, he can tell how much he  _ scared  _ Rei.

He can see it in the way Rei keeps glancing back at him, every ten seconds - especially when the nurses finally let him wander around a bit - as if to catch him crumpling to the ground again.

It wasn’t fair of him to do that to Rei, and he knows it. But at the time, Nagisa knew he might not make it out with an injury like that, and he wanted to have one,  _ one  _ entirely honest conversation with one of his friends, all cards on the table, no little hidden side-glances or pretend-bites of food, before he died.

(Nagisa remembers, after his knees caved and just before the world went grey, thinking that he was glad it was Rei.)

Honestly, if their positions were switched and Nagisa had to watch  _ Rei _ almost die, he would probably have cried until he threw up and then spent the rest of eternity clinging to Rei like a koala bear.

He’d definitely been a little terrified out of his mind when he had found Rei bleeding and unresponsive in an alleyway, but the wound had already begun to scab by the time Nagisa had managed to drag him into the coffee shop.

Upon Nagisa’s questioning, Rei told him about ghoul healing, which was interesting at first, but he began using a bunch of really fancy big words like  _ intracellular metabolism _ and  _ oxidative phosphorylation  _ and Nagisa kind of tuned him out after that.

Rin can’t visit as much as Nagisa would like (which would be all the time), and he can’t say much about the rebellion (and Nagisa is beginning to suspect he’s like, a major leader or something, which would be super cool), but he does ruffle Nagisa’s hair and call him a dumbass for almost dying and talk about a human named Nitori who had joined the ghouls even before “Nagisa and Rei’s weird stunt” made it acceptable.

Nagisa begs to meet this guy and talk about their shared experiences, but Rin just knocks him on the head and tells him he can’t join the rebellion until he can throw a punch without ripping stitches.

Nagisa huffs, Rei muffles a smile into his hand, and Rin rolls his eyes. It’s a nice afternoon.

Nagisa is discharged two weeks after he wakes up, with pages and pages of instructions on how to change bandages and keep his wound clean until it heals fully. They’re going to meet the others at a small, nondescript safehouse, somewhere to stay while their ward is still overrun with riots.

Rei finds him sitting on the hospital bed the day of his release, staring at the vase of daffodils that he’s been keeping with him for almost his entire stay. They’re old now, brown and crinkled and curling in on themselves.

“Do you want to take those with you?” Rei asks, one hand reaching for Nagisa’s bag and the other adjusting his new pair of glasses.

Nagisa turns to him, and smiles. There are faded scratches on his cheeks and forehead, and shadows under his eyes from not-quite-caught-up-on sleep, but his grin is still as bunchy and beaming as it has been for as long as Rei has known him. “Nah,” he says, bouncing off the bed and onto his feet. “We’re almost in daffodil season, anyway.”

Nagisa bounds out the doors of the hospital, gulping in the icy, early-morning air with so much enthusiasm that he actually starts choking, leaving Rei to thump him lightly on the back, rolling his eyes and trying to hide amusement.

Golden light yawns through the cracks between the buildings, illuminating their way down the pavement. The two of them pause for a moment.

“Rei-chan,” Nagisa says softly, shielding his eyes. “The sun is back.”

And for the first time since the snowstorm, two and a half weeks ago, it is.

**Author's Note:**

> to write a 7k word fic, it can take me anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 months. i've been working on this since june.
> 
> the reigisa was intentionally left ambiguous as to whether it was platonic or romantic, i'm down for either tbh but romance wasn't really meant to be the focus.
> 
> nagisa's role in this is a pretty obvious parallel to a certain character from TG that i won't name for spoiler reasons, but anyone who has watched the show will know. it was also 100% inspired by touka & yoriko's relationship dynamic. they make me emotional y'know.
> 
> fun factoid before i sleep for 23 hours: the full stanza from the title of the poem is "the sun pours / light and life / into all living things / but suffers self-burning." which i think is neat and also fits into the theme of the fic.
> 
> my tumblr is @brightwritesstuff :)


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